What You're Looking For (Is Sometimes Right in Front of You)
by tvfan69
Summary: Takes place after the mid-season finale. Amaya wasn't too thrilled to hear that Gideon has apparently been altering Mick's brain, so she goes to have a chat with him about it. It seems like there is always more to Mick that she previously thought, and maybe the two of them are a lot more alike than she initially realized.


_"Who says I don't?"_

That… that did not sit well with Amaya.

Nate's comment had been meant as a joke, although it wasn't one she found to be very funny, but it was a battle that wasn't worth fighting.

Not until Gideon spoke up.

Ever since he pointed it out, she had been able to see what Mick meant by the others only pretending that he's a part of the team. She had noticed that although they were usually willing to hear him, listening tended to be another issue. His contributions to the plans had been consisting of sarcastic comments, and she was starting to get the feeling that it didn't start out that way. It was however, awful as it may sound, a treatment for him that she could live with. It was a leash, and whereas she had agreed to help Mick she is not stupid and knows that sometimes he does in fact need someone to hold his leash. But the more time she spends with these people the more she starts to think none of them are exactly qualified.

It's nothing against any of them; she knows from experience that it takes a special kind of person to correctly help someone like Mick. It's a frustrating process, one that is filled with as many steps backwards as forwards, and frankly she isn't even sure that it ever truly ends.

She finds him in the galley, and somehow she's not surprised to find that he's drinking again. Sometimes she wonders if he has a problem. She would never bring it up to him, or at least she has no intentions of it any time soon. It's never caused a problem on a mission, unless one were to count the derailed destruction plan in the old west, and so she has decided that until his drinking endangers someone she'll keep her mouth shut on the topic.

"What do you want?" His low voice rumbles when he glances out of the corner of his eye and catches her in the doorway, before he returns his focus back to his beer.

"Funny, I came to ask you the same thing?" She replies and now she has his attention, in fact the bottle stops halfway to his lips and he then chooses to instead set it down on the counter.

"I'm a thief, I want a lot of things." He replies, but she isn't going to let him beat this around the bush.

"Maybe," she agrees, sliding herself into the empty seat next to him. "But altered brainwaves aren't exactly something you can steal."

He looks at her, his face indicating that he's waiting for her to say more but she isn't going to. She's not going to accuse him of anything more than she knows, not before he explains himself. When he finally appears to get that he takes another swig of his beer, this one longer than most others she's witnessed, before he finally has no choice other than to put the bottle down and say something.

"How do you know about that?" He asks, his eyes avoiding hers when he suddenly becomes all too aware of the fact that he doesn't want her judging him. If this were any other member of the team asking him about this he would have no problem with looking them in the eye and telling them point blank why he's been messing with things they think he's too dumb to understand. But for whatever reason the fact that it was Amaya who had to come and find him made him feel something that he hasn't felt in a long time.

Shame.

He's so caught up in his own thoughts that he doesn't really notice how uncomfortable Amaya suddenly looks.

"When Gideon was healing Ness's brain damage Nate asked why she doesn't do the same for you, she said that she does." Her voice is quiet, almost timid even, and she watches Mick carefully for a reaction. He doesn't give much of one; the only indication that he's even heard her comes from low rumbling sound he makes at the back of his throat and just the slightest shift of his eyes. "Mick," she says, hoping that his name would prompt him to meet her eyes but even when that fails she still continues. "You aren't suffering from brain damage-"

He barks out a laugh at that, effectively cutting off the words that he considers to be nothing but lies.

"That's where you're wrong," he tells her. "I may not be incapacitated like our friend was, but that doesn't mean that my brain is working right."

Amaya gives a quizzical look in response to his question, one that he seems to revel in as he presses his bottle to his smirking lips.

"What do you-" She starts, but then she stops. He sends her one pointed look over the side of the bottle and that's all it takes for her to understand his motives. "Mick, there is nothing wrong with your brain." She tries to tell him, reaching over and laying an assuring hand on his arm. It breaks her heart a little, seeing what it is that he thinks of himself. Sure she knows he's damaged, but it's hard to get very far in life and not be.

But he isn't seeing himself as merely damaged, she doesn't think. No, he is seeing himself as something far more extreme.

He's seeing himself as broken.

"Hate to burst your bubble sweetheart, but you're wrong." He insists, setting down his beer and shaking off her hand.

"No I'm not," Amaya is quick to argue. "I've told you before, that animal inside you-"

"If you can honestly tell me," He interrupts her, looking at her with maybe the most serious expression she has ever seen on his face. "That the fourteen year old kid who burned his family alive was completely right in the head, well then I might not be the only one who needs their brainwaves altered."

Amaya, having never been told any details regarding Mick's past, was obviously a little taken back by the words that came out of his mouth. She did her best not to let any reaction show, and went to tell him that he is not that boy anymore.

But when she met his eyes, she found that she couldn't.

Everything suddenly clicked for her, and the enigma that is Mick Rory began making sense. He isn't that boy anymore, but that boy left a permanent mark on his mind. He never had the chance to properly heal from that day, and so he didn't. She can't say without asking what exactly happened to him, but she can certainly doubt that anyone ever offered him much understanding. She was, after all, a teenager herself once. Had she ever heard about someone her own age murdering his own family, well she wouldn't exactly have been rushing to help them.

"Why?" She finds herself asking, he only looks at her with eyes that question if she's really asking what he thinks she is. "Why did you do it?"

He's quiet for a minute; then he releases a long sigh. The cops all asked him the same thing back when it first happened. They couldn't make heads or tails of why a kid who's record boasted his biggest offence as fraudulent hall passes would randomly decide to set fire to his home and watch it burn with his parents still inside. He couldn't really understand it either, and to this day his motives are still lost on him. Not that this is any of Amaya's damn business; he doesn't owe her any kind of explanation for his past.

"Don't know," he grumbles before taking yet another, although considerably smaller, sip of his beer. "But if you're anything like the cops, you're not going to believe that."

He's not expecting her to smile, but she does, and he won't admit it but it puts a warm feeling inside of him.

"Good thing I never became a cop," she says it almost mockingly, leaning forward against the countertop and silently informing him that even though she believes him the conversation isn't over. "Mick, altering your brain isn't going to change what you did."

"I know," he assures her, "I'm not looking for that."

"Then what are you looking for?" She asks and again it's a long moment or two before he's able to reply.

This isn't something he likes to talk about; even Snart only ever knew the bare minimum of detail. A part of him knows that he should've told Amaya to get lost long before getting to this point, but he can't help himself. Every time that he catches those doe eyes staring at him he suddenly finds the barbed wire fence that he keeps around his feelings has been cut in a few places, just enough for her to sneak in.

"I'm sick," He finally tells her, although she doesn't seem to understand right away what it is that he means. "After the incident, they didn't exactly send me straight to Juvie." Suddenly his gaze grows distant, and he picks up the bottle but his hand stops before it reaches his lips. "No," his voice rumbles, "At first they sent me somewhere much worse." With that said he takes a quick swig to finish off the last of the beer before setting the empty bottle back onto the counter. "First they questioned me. Asked me why I did it, and when they didn't like what they heard they shipped me off to this place in the next state. I was too dangerous to go back to regular school while I waited for a trial, but they couldn't exactly throw me in the local jail on account of I was a minor. So they sent me to a… special… school, basically it was Juvie but they made you go to classes. They put me in a health class while I was there, teacher showed us a video Schizophrenia and other things like that. Arson wasn't on the list but…" He trailed off, the topic clearly a sensitive one for him and rendering him barely able to finish. Amaya considered coming to his rescue, in fact she opened her mouth to do just that, but before she could she heard his sharp intake of breath and she could see that he wanted to say something more. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, before finally sighing and hanging his head in shame. "I threw up after class," he confessed, he then looked at her as though he were waiting for her to mock him. But the only response she gave him was a look of sympathy.

No, scratch that, it wasn't sympathy.

It was understanding.

"I can imagine," she said, "I don't think I need to tell you what's done to the mentally ill in my time. Even assuming progress will be made I can't imagine what they showed you was very pleasant."

Mick shook his head, even though that day was lifetimes ago and probably forgotten by most of his classmates within the week, the memory still holds the power to make him question everything about himself.

"It showed us all these people whose lives fell apart from the inside out, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. It told us that people could get help, but the cases we saw didn't look like they were helped all that much." He explained and Amaya nodded.

"So…" She began, "You think that Gideon rewiring your brain will cure you of your love of fire, and if you don't feel that anymore you'll be able to make peace with what you did?"

"Bingo," he replies, drawing out the "o" and pointing a finger in her direction. "Gideon fixes my brain, the monster goes away." He says, clapping his hands together as if he were dusting off some undesirable dirt from them. Amaya nods at his logic; he did not expect her to nod.

They sit there quietly, and he tries not to stare at her while he waits for her to point out some sort of flaw in his plan, but it's taking a lot longer than he had thought it would and when she actually stands up he realizes that this is not going to play out at all how he was expecting.

"You're not going to try and talk me out of it?" He asks incredulously, his brow crinkling even more when she shakes her head.

"No," She confirms before she brings one of her hands to her totem and allows herself to glance down at it for a brief moment, a wistful expression on her face before she returned her eyes to Mick and they suddenly hold nothing but seriousness. "My mother warned me, before I put this on, that there would be no going back. The spirits within it would be tied to my own from that day forward. I chose to take on this totem, and I don't regret my decision. But sometimes… I miss the freedom." She confessed, "I miss knowing that each emotion I felt was my own. I miss not feeling the fear and the anger of the animals at the back of my mind, and I miss not spending every day waking up with the thought that it could be the day I lose control." She paused for a moment, a small crack had wormed its way into her voice and she needs a moment to stop it. In other words, she needs a moment to put her armor back on and Mick would not allow her that, not after she just got the worst days of his life out of him.

Before he could stop himself, Mick ended up on his feet and all but yanking Amaya into him for a hug. It was merely a few hours ago that she had hugged him and he had been… well… awkward about it. But this time he practically trapped her in his arms, tightening his grip when she let out a stifled cry against his chest. She wound her arms around his waist and squeezed him almost as tightly as he was squeezing her. She sniffled a few times as Mick rocked her ever so slightly from side to side. They stood there in a comfortable sort of silence for what felt like an eternity, until the sound of something shattering down the hall followed by Ray's shouts of "Nate did it!" and Nate's "Did not!" brought them both back to reality.

Amaya smiled with amusement as Mick let her go, and that only increased when she noticed that he suddenly looked very awkward about their current situation and the thought of how someone could've easily come across it.

"Good luck Mick," she said to him, pulling his attention back to her. "I hope you find what you're looking for."

With that said she began to make her way out of the galley, and she had just reached the doorway when Mick decided his question needed asking.

"Hey Amaya?" He called out, getting her to turn back towards him. "If this doesn't work, um…" He trailed off, unsure of how to ask if her offer would still stand, but the smile she gave him showed that she understood.

"You know where to find me."


End file.
